HAF932 AMD Final Thoughts

I've been in the computer industry since the early 1980s. Back then, the standard computer case was a mild steel interior surrounded with a beige plastic shell. Even purpose built cast industrial foam cases like the ones used by early Apple ][ computers and the long-forgotten Corvus Concept were the same shade of beige. Styling as an end in itself for a computer case has crept in slowly over the years, with occasional dramatic one-offs and the eventual brand styling used today by companies like Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard. The original HAF 932 design in all black is dramatic enough; but the ADM Edition pushes to boundaries further, perhaps too far for some. Personally, I liked it a lot, while my wife thinks it's "silly."

A case this large and with this much expansion capabilities seems almost wasted in the AMD consumer space. Unlike the "extended ATX" and E-ATX form factors we've seen in some Intel X58 boards, top-end AMD 790FX boards easily fit within the standard ATX form factor. A dual-Opteron server motherboard would fit, though, and a system with two 6-core "Istanbul" Opterons in this case would be rather cool, if very expensive.

The trend in extreme air cooling these days is cases with their interiors divided into "thermal zones": a zone for the power supply; a zone for the video cards and hard drives, and a final zone for everything else. Cooler Master sticks with the ATX standard "air in at the bottom front, air out at the top and rear" cooling path, but they're moving enough air that I don't think the zone concept would provide any better cooling.

It's disappointing that all the air intakes are unfiltered. The amount of air this case moves ensures that you'll be blowing the dust out of the interior more frequently than you'd like. The case has more exhaust fan capacity than intake fan capacity, which would normally mean it would be a "negative pressure" case, but there's so much ventilation at the front, top, back, and bottom of the case that you'll never see any pressure differential. The case does do without the 230mm side fan of the standard HAF 932, which might be useful in some situations such as tri-SLI setups, but really, this case provides enough ventilation to handle just about anything you throw at it.